Maria and I slipped my photos for the George Forss – Jon Katz “Looking At Our World” show in their frames today, Maria worked at a frame shop for seven years, it is a handy thing this week, will help us keep the cost of each photo down to $200 matted with archival paper and framed. George did the printing, it is amazing. George has 17 photos for the show, I have 12, they will be offered for sale at the Round House Cafe starting next Monday, February 10, reception 7 to 8:30 February 20, I am very proud to be doing a show with one of the premier photographers alive today. A dream come true.
This is one of my favorite photos, it’s going in the show, I lay down in a storm to get this shot of Red holding the sheep, it captures the soul of this dog.
I went to see my health care practitioner for my three month diabetes management check-up, Karen Bruce is smart, honest and funny – she believes in patient’s making decisions, she is blunt and direct about my caring for myself, we just click. She is also a poet and writer and for a few minutes at the beginning and end of our sessions, we talk about poetry and short stories. I have found the key to dealing with American health care: stay away from all male doctors and find a nurse-practitioner, they are smart, available and generally pretty nice people.
In the waiting room, I was sitting next to a man who was staring at the scare-and-fear medical channel warning people about diabetes, obesity, etc. and peddling various medications – an ethical doctor would not have these channels selling things in the waiting room. Diabetes is a big business and it is in, in many ways, a Fear Machine of it’s own, I have had so many people send me the most outrageously alarmist and false and hysterical misinformation about diabetes that they got online or from their Uncle Harry, whose leg fell off. I joked about the diabetes reports on the waiting room channel, and the man said he was a diabetic, he was coming to the health center because his wife took his blood sample, and it was high.
How high?,I asked. Oh, 700 he said, and I almost fell off the chair and offered him my spot in the line, I thought he might need an ambulance. I’ve never had a sugar reading one third that high, and would be quite upset if I did. No, he said, he was all right, he got sleepy and dizzy sometimes, he didn’t like to take his medications and got sick of giving himself all those insulin shots, besides he likes to eat what he likes to eat. Well, I thought, his leg will probably fall off in a few years, this is the frustration the nurses always talk about. I stopped myself from cautioning him, he wouldn’t like it any more than I do, it is his life, his choices to make.
I have not had that issue of denial and avoidance, Karen straightened me out right away. She and I have managed my diabetes well, my blood pressure is excellent, my cholesterol level is fine, my blood sugar level is consistent and exactly where we both want it to be, day after day. We had a slight dust-up, she wants me to come in every time I get sick, she wanted me to come in when I got the stomach trouble, I didn’t, and so I didn’t get a sticker today. She did mutter that I seemed to take good care of myself, so maybe it was all right this time.
Diabetes is a funny disease, colds and stress and many other things can throw it off, when I got my gastroenteritis my numbers were jumping all over the place, I’ve got it back under control, I take four injections a day, one 24 hour dose and one smaller one before each meal. When you have diabetes, viruses hang out longer in your body, they do funky things in different ways. Karen is worried that like the man in the waiting room I’ll get bored and restless with all of the needles, meters, strips, lancets, pills and cotton balls and stop taking care of myself, I keep telling her that is not likely, I am focused and determined and I see the management of my diabetes as a creative challenge. I don’t drop those.
Social media can be a nightmare for diabetics, people love nothing more than to collect the horror stories from their friends and family – amputations, kidney failures, heart attacks, diabetic comas and pass them along. One woman warned me on Facebook not to ever get a tattoo as they were dangerous for diabetics. This is quite blatantly false in my case – it can sometimes be true – and I told her I would ban her from my site if she said anything like that again. She apologized, I appreciated that. Facebook is the alarm and hysteria center of the new universe.
The mind is critical to the management of disease, living in fear and alarm is as dangerous as any chronic illness can be. I take responsibility for my health, diabetes has been good for me, it awakened me to many things I needed to deal with in my life and also installed in me the confidence that I can care for myself. Karen says I am her best patient, I am proud of that.
I don’t talk much about diabetes and don’t care to be defined by it or asked about. In the nurse’s office are all kinds of signs warning about eyesight, feet neuropathy, cuts and exercise, Karen and I laugh about those, diabetes, like everything else, is an individual disease, everyone is affected differently. It is also a vast industry now, dependent on scaring the wits out of people who have it. Managing it is complex, it takes discipline and attention, every day, much of the day – how you feel, what the blood level is, what you eat, how you move, what is happening in your life. Somethings you have to listen to, somethings you have to dismiss. I accept it, I do not live in dread of it. We live in a world of alarms and conspiracies, that is not my world. I wish I could tell this to my friend in the waiting room, he did not look well and will not be well for long I fear.
It is unusual to come across beautiful animals and know that something awful is almost certain to be about to happen to them, I think that is perhaps what drives me the most, God spare the animals of the world from the well-meaning intrusions of human beings, there is nothing in all of history more dangerous to them.
A good and sincere person e-mailed me this morning to protest about my writing on behalf of the carriage horses, “I hate to see any animal cooped up in a city stall,” she said, anguished, “they ought to be grazing in the wild.” A few generations ago, many Americans lived on farms or grew up on them, but the family farms are perishing, the big corporate farms replacing them, the cows of the future will never set food outside of their concrete moorings.
I wanted to take this good woman by the hand and bring her out here to upstate New York to the wild, to see the carcasses of the deer and coyotes and racoons and moles, dead of starvation, eaten by predators, struggling to live through this awful and bitter winter. Animals come from the real world, we cannot protect them from the ravages of life any more than we can insulate ourselves and our families. Some will get sore feet, die of strokes and heart attacks, eat some poisonous thing, get some untreatable affection. There is a difference between life and abuse, reality and cruelty, anyone who lives on a farm, or with animals knows it, understands it.
As we romanticize about the lives of animals, we lose touch with the truth of them, we patronize them and lose respect for them and their adaptability, we need more and more to see them as piteous and helpless because that is how we feel about ourselves and our own lives. We need to save them from us and our good intentions, these intentions are driving animals out of our midst, we need to know them, we need a wiser and more knowing understanding of them.
To understand the surreal dynamics of the move to ban the carriage horses from New York City, it’s helpful to understand this: the new mayor of New York is close to and supportive of the demonstrators who gather in Central Park regularly to shout “Greedy Tourists Go Home!” at people who travel all over the country and parts of the world, often with children, to ride the horse-drawn carriages in the park.
These groups – they call themselves animal rights activists – appear to be close friends and supporters of the new mayor, and they seem to be shaping his views of animals and their care, since he has never lived with any. There are not many cities in the country where mayors would be comfortable insulting tourists and one of their favorite attractions, especially in a city with 48 million visitors a year who bring with them many jobs and billions of dollars. It seems those people you see on the news waving placards and screaming at people are now making policy and may well decide the fate of the few horses remaining in New York City.
One thing about this wrenching conflict for me is that it appears intrinsically illogical, and the more you learn about it, the less sense it makes. It just seems to unfold in one lurching way after another, black and white to some people, incomprehensible to others a blur of hues to me. One website in New York believes it has found out some things about real estate and campaign contributions that may help explain it.
When I think of the Central Park carriage horses and the feeling among some that they have no place in New York any longer, my mind can’t help going to the dogs, and if you substitute “dogs” for “horses” in the overheated rhetoric of the chanters, you might suddenly acquire some perspective about the horses. I did, it’s where I started out.
I even substituted “dogs” for “horses” in some of the chants shouted at the protesters who call themselves animal rights activists. It’s hard to imagine any mayor mad enough to propose banning dogs, but then I would not have imagined a few months ago that we would be very close to banning carriage horses from the city. But what if the protesters chanted this?: “Heartless Dog Owners! LEAVE TOWN!
Greedy Dog Walkers! LEAVE TOWN!
Heartless Dog Rescue Groups! LEAVE TOWN!
Animal Abusers! LEAVE TOWN!”
Dogs were not, of course, meant to live in crowded urban environments any more than horses were – except for some of the lapdogs bred for european royalty. There are Great Danes, German Shepherds, Burmese Mountain Dogs, Newfoundlands, Pit Bulls and border collies all over New York. Every single thing that is said of the horses is true about the dogs. They have no choice about where they live, they have little grass or open space in which to run, they live in confined spaces with little room to move freely – the protesters might call these living spaces “cells,” the dogs are “shackled” on leashes and harnesses, they never get to roam free or live the natural lives of dogs. In the summer, some dogs in New York perish in cars from the heat, others die of exposure in the winter, some fall out of apartment windows or are attacked by aggressive dogs and killed.
There are more dogs abused and neglected in New York City in a month than horses that have been abused in decades. The police say there are really too many cases of pet abuse to count. Beyond that, dogs are killed by cars and trucks and busses, even by subway trains, some collapse and die on the streets from strokes and heart attacks, as some horses have, others starved or overfed, many are filthy and never washed.
Would the demonstrators who scream at tourists and carriage horse drivers on the streets dare to suggest that dogs be exiled from the city to rescue farms or set free to roam in the mythical wild pasture believed by some New Yorkers to still exist outside the city limits? Perhaps they are not as unhinged as they seem.
No naturalist would ever argue that New York City is the natural or proper home for dogs, but it is important and interesting to acknowledge that New Yorkers have, by and large, made it work. I have friends in the city with border collies who have wonderful lives there, as good as many in the country – they go to parks, take long walks, chase frisbees, go to play groups, run around in garages and empty lots, get to neighborhood vets, so many dogs in New York appear to live healthy and meaningful lives.
It is apparent that they do a lot for people, they heal much of the fragmentation and disconnection of urban life. If was not always so, even a few decades ago dogs were banned from most apartments, barred from work spaces and parks.
Dog owners and lovers fought to change that, they lobbied for access to parks, they brought therapy dogs to schools and hospitals, formed all kinds of associations and play groups, pushed companies to allow employees to bring dogs to work.
Today, dogs are accepted as an integral part of life in the city, they are precious and important to people. Why, I wonder, would animal lovers and the city deny the same to horses – animals that have been in the city longer than domesticated dogs – the right to the same? Why aren’t animal lovers, and people who call themselves “animal rights” advocates fighting to do as much for the horses as they did for the dogs? So many people love to see the carriages horses, they are healing in the same way many animals are, they evoke smiles, wonder, the mystery of nature and the natural world. For many people, they personify romance, connect us to history. They are important to many of us, even if we do not shout and are not heard. And yes, their spirits do cry out for justice, I hear them even from far away.
I’m beginning to understand why horses are the only animal politicians would dare to attack. The mayor doesn’t have a pet, let alone a horse. The City Council President has a cat, “of course a rescue cat,” she says. Few people in the city have much contact with the horses or know anything about them, some see the horses as a throwback to old customs and something only tourists get to see. They have no real connection to them, or to the opportunities they present, thus they are vulnerable to the idea that they don’t belong here, and that their lives and work is cruel. They hear it day after day, our media are equal opportunity manipulators, as long as you can shout. Thus the horse’s very lack of interaction, work and connection with people in the city could well cost them their lives, their very existence in the Emerald City. For me, the lesson is we need more of them, not none of them.
People in New York do not yet seem to make the very important connection that exists between horses and their dogs, one that is powerful, undeniable, and literally under their noses. The two species are the same, the issues are the same. Dogs show us how animals can survive and be integrated in our lives. Horses are bigger, but have also lived and worked around people for thousands of years. Dogs and horses (and donkeys and cats) adapt well to work and small spaces, as long as they get exercise and attention. If the animal rights demonstrators were talking about raccoons, their protests might make some sense. Horses are dearly loved by people who get to know and understand them, if the horses had a broader role in the lives of New Yorkers, as opposed to vanishing from their lives, and more people knew them, there would be riots in the streets if clueless politicians tried to ban them. Horses, like dogs, have always worked for people and lived among them, been loved by them, been worked by them. They carry them, haul their belongings, heal them, touch them.
Horses, in many ways, have a more legitimate claim to being in the city than dogs. People say New York City is simply no place for horses now, it is too crowded, dangerous and polluted. The horses cannot speak for themselves, the people who know them the best have been pushed aside, ignored by politicians and ideologues.
We do know that working horses have been in New York City for hundreds of years and if you love the history of animals, you know that for almost all of that time, horses have lived in far worse conditions than they live in now. They did not get clean and fresh water all day, or fresh green hay in bales, their stalls were not large or mucked out every three hours, they were not sprayed by cooling mists when it was hot, were not regulated by veterinarians and inspected by the police, they were subject to all kinds of diseases and poisons, sprayed for flies. They experienced all kinds of diseases and poisons, walked in sewage, were savaged by bugs and mosquitoes, and in the summer and winter and rain on overcrowded streets with rough and uneven stones. There were no limits on the weight of the things they pulled or the hours they worked, there was virtually no health care for them, if they were sick or injured they were slaughtered and chopped up for meat and feed or simply left to die on the street or in their stables.
How ironic, having endured all of that for so long, that some powerful groups and political leaders and millionnaire developers have abruptly and arbitrarily decided it is no longer possible for them to live there, and so must be sent off to overcrowded, underfunded rescue “farms” and “preserves,” or, as we all know is more likely, to be die so they can be saved. I am not considered the sanest person in any room I am in, but I am struggling to grasp the reasoning behind all of this, it is not the ethos of animal lovers to ban animals from our lives. Shame on the ASPCA for abandoning these wonderful creatures rather than fighting to protect them. The organization decided that the horses were “unnecessary” and “unnatural” for New York. But Great Danes are?
If the horses can’t live in New York, why and how can any animal? Perhaps Central Park in New York is only really safe for real estate developers and people who live in million-dollar condos. Dogs and horses are our brothers and sisters in the animal world, closer to one another and to many of us. New Yorkers have proven that dogs have a place in the world, perhaps they will awaken in time and do the same for the carriage horses of Central Park.
“We patronize the animals for their incompleteness,” wrote Henry Beston, “for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.”
